Hello everyone! Happy Friday. While Greg, the fearless Week in Review leader, is enjoying his maternity leave, I’m doing my part curating the latest on the front lines of tech news. It was once again a roller coaster week as economic headwinds took a brutal and demoralizing toll and chaos reigned over Elon Musk’s Twitter. demoed an improved bipedal robot, Wikipedia began a redesign, and major universities banned TikTok from their campus networks. Yeah — a lot has happened.
Before we get into it, TechCrunch Early Stage 2023 will be held on April 20th in Boston. This is his day in the life for founders in the first stages of growing a company, for founders who have built a product but don’t know how to monetize it, for founders who have ideas but don’t know where to direct their resources. Summit. Make it a viable business. During the early stages, experts will share advice on protecting intellectual property, building Cap his table, developing targeted customer personas, and more. you won’t want to miss it.
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Alphabet makes significant reductions. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced Friday that it will cut about 6% of its global workforce, or about 12,000 jobs. Pole report. In an open letter published by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the story follows a similar trajectory with other companies that have scaled back in recent months and what the company is currently facing. said they were “hired for different economic realities.” .
Twitter prohibits third-party clients. After ditching high-profile app makers like Tweetbot and Twitterific, Twitter has quietly updated its developer terms to ban third-party Twitter clients entirely. His 5,000-word “limit” section on Twitter developer agreement Updated with clause prohibiting “use or access” [to] This seems unlikely to encourage much goodwill at a time when Twitter faces challenges on many fronts.
Break Hastings Retreat: Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings announced Thursday that he is stepping down after more than two decades at the company. taylor writing. While the news of his resignation comes as a shock, Hastings said in the announcement that Netflix plans “for years” to lead the next era of leadership. will retain its co-CEO position and promote COO Greg Peters to a tandem role with Ted Sarandos.
College students, no TikTok for you: Public universities across a wide swath of US states have banned TikTok in recent months, followed earlier this week by two of the country’s largest universities. taylor The University of Texas and Texas A&M University have reportedly taken action against a social app owned by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, banning campus networks and device users from accessing TikTok. A recent series of bans was inspired by executive orders issued by a number of state governors.
Wikipedia gets a makeover: This week, Wikipedia, a resource used by billions of people each month, got a desktop makeover for the first time in over a decade. Sara writing. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Wikipedia project, has launched an updated interface aimed at making the site more accessible and easier to use. This includes additions such as improved search, a more prominently located tool for switching languages, and an updated header that provides access to commonly used . such as links.
Pour one into AmazonSmile. Just days after announcing massive layoffs, Amazon announced it was ending AmazonSmile, its donation program that diverts 0.5% of the cost of all eligible products to charity. Amazon claimed that the program “hasn’t grown enough to be impactful.” [it] At first, I hoped romance Since 2013, Amazon has donated $400 million through AmazonSmile. Ending it seems more likely a move to cut costs.
Data breach victim payday: If you’re one of the nearly 77 million people affected by last year’s T-Mobile breach, you could get a few bucks. Devin reports that he will pay $350 million for the company to be split between clients and lawyers, and that he will pay $150 million for “data security and related technology.” The breach appears to have occurred early last year, after which collections of T-Mobile’s customer data were put up for sale on various crime forums.
A robot that throws as well as grabs: Bravery at TechCrunch Matt Burns Hyundai-backed Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot, Atlas, features gripper hands that can lift and lower anything the robot can independently grasp. It consists of fingers and one movable finger. According to Boston Dynamics, the gripper is designed for heavy lifting tasks like Atlas holding a barrel overhead in a Super Bowl commercial. witty.
Dungeons & Dragons: After weeks of backlash and protests from fans, Wizards of the Coast — the Hasbro-owned publisher of Dungeons & Dragons — has licensed the core mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Announced. This gives the community a “worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license” to publish and sell works based on Dungeons & Dragons. A license that requires certain Dungeons & Dragons content creators to start paying his 25% royalty.
Audio summary
Whether it’s to kill time on your commute or spice up your morning jog, TechCrunch has podcasts to suit your tastes. In this week’s startup-focused equities, Natasha, Mary Ann When Rebecca We talked about various news weeks, including Sophia Amoruso’s new fund, a deal from Welcome Homes, and the introduction of a tribute-focused social media app. Found, meanwhile, features GigFinesse co-founder and CEO Mir Hwang, whose struggles to book music gigs as a teenager inspired him to start a company that connects artists with live show venues. It is said that it became
TechCrunch+
TC+, TechCrunch’s premium channel for deep dives, research, guest posts, and general analysis, was (as always) jam-packed with content this week. Here are some of our most popular posts:
Regarding Twitter’s Data Breach Response: curly I am writing about the Twitter data breach that allegedly exposed the contact information of millions of users.so Blog posts without attributionTwitter said it conducted a “thorough investigation” and found no “evidence” that recent Twitter user data sold online was obtained by exploiting vulnerabilities in Twitter’s systems. However, as she points out, it’s unclear whether Twitter has technical means, such as logs, to determine if user data has been exposed.
Last unicorn: VCs believe most unicorn companies are no longer worth $1 billion. Rebecca A look at the current investment landscape shows that many of the companies that reached unicorn status last year are in danger of losing unicorn status as economic conditions deteriorate.
Sexism in the workplace: Women-founded startups raised 1.9% of all VC funding in 2022, down from 2021. Dominic Madori writing. This percentage is a notable drop from her 2.4% all-female team, which was raised in 2021. The drop was expected, but still grim. Aside from 2016, 2012 was the last time an all-female-led startup raised such a low percentage of funding, another time when economic uncertainty and elections reduced funding.
